Re: [Axiom-developer] Lisp

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

root wrote:

> That's fair. There was no claim that lisp is the right language for
> any particular purpose. Ruby is fine and Rails is the fastest path
> to a website solution. Lisp is ill suited for that purpose and for
> many other purposes.

Well ... I wasn't specifically referring to Rails but rather to Ruby as 
a general purpose programming languages. Unfortunately, there *are* web 
site frameworks and libraries in Common Lisp. It's not that Lisp is 
ill-suited or well-suited for web applications that's the problem. It's 
that competent Lisp programmers are hard to find, and your application 
becomes costly to maintain.

Similarly, there are a lot of Rails developers that only know enough 
Ruby to hack (badly) on an existing Rails site. Again, that's a recipe 
for an unmaintainable application. I remember a poster from the 1950s -- 
"If you don't know what you're doing, don't do it here!" :)

> Spad is a conceptually different level of language and is not
> syntactic sugar. It is clear that you want a spad-like language to do
> mathematics. Lisp is ill-suited for that purpose also.

If Spad is the user-visible language that I see when I use Axiom, I 
agree. If it's a lower-level language than that, then I don't really 
think so. I think you want the full higher-level language to "do 
mathematics". At least to do *applied* mathematics, that is -- I 
couldn't do theoretical mathematics even with infinitely powerful tools. :)